Security Resource

During his presentation this week at the Gigaom Structure Data 2014 conference in San Francisco, Prism Skylabs Founder/CEO Steve Russell explained that Walmart captures 30,000 hours of videos at its stores every minute, but most of that footage goes straight to archive, and is being stored on hard drives without anyone ever looking at it again.

The same is true for all that video that’s been recorded by most of the other 15 million security cameras in retail stores, reported gigaom.com.

Prism Skylabs has started to offer retailers ways to analyze all that footage more closely, and Russell showed off some possible applications during his presentation at the conference. For example, video data be used to measure which path consumers are taking within a store and then compare these results with what happens when they move a display case or a piece of furniture around.

Of course, uploading security camera data and crunching it for analytics touches on privacy issues. “It’s sort of creepy,” said Russell. That’s why his company has developed algorithms that can completely remove captured shoppers from the picture, according to the gigaom.com story.

Also measurable is the attention that certain products are getting and the impact placement of these products, or even the positioning of a mannequin, is having on consumers. Retail chains used to make these decisions centrally, based on the assumption that there is a golden formula on how its stores should look like. But after analyzing data from cameras, Russell found out that this isn’t the case. “It turns out that all stores and geographies aren’t equal,” he said.

To read the entire story and view a video clip from Russell’s presentation, click here.